More Dishonesty About Honesty

With the insurance industry so focused on improving the customer experience, many have turned to behavioral economists for insights into how customers actually think, as opposed to how we think they think or how we want them to think. But... wow... behavioral economists sure aren’t doing much for their credibility.

Two years ago, evidence surfaced that the data had been faked in the most famous study yet done with insurance customers. The study, conducted with 13,500 actual customers and published in a paper in 2012, supposedly showed that people were more truthful on their applications for auto insurance if they were simply asked to attest to their honesty at the beginning of the application rather than after they had completed it.

But challenges eventually led to the publication of the raw data, which was obviously and rather clumsily faked, and the "landmark" paper was retracted in 2021. Blame fell on one of the four co-authors, Dan Ariely, a best-selling author who became chief behavioral officer at Lemonade in 2015 and held that position until 2020.

Now, another of those co-authors has been accused of faking the data in one of the two other studies cited in that 2012 paper and has been placed on leave by Harvard Business School. The much-cited researcher, Francesca Gino, has been accused of manufacturing the data for other studies, too.

Is it too much to ask for some honesty about honesty?